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Saturday, August 25, 2018

Candida Höfer at Kukje Gallery

Taking photos of jewelry would have been clearer. The act of appropriation here attempt subversion of the institution by spotlighting it. As if a highlighter critiques its excised words. The Bechers, as post Sander taxonomists, prophesied a world that was complete document, threatening the world with their cold camera whereas their now even-more-famous students wielded this mechanical coldness to excise from the world the blank jewels that undergirds so much contemporary art. Blankness becomes the lure for the viewer to feel rewarded for the ability to backfill the emptiness with everything they can throw at it: there's a thousand things we can say about these because they are illustrations without text, use them for anything. We invent ghosts inside machines, or architectures without people. The "technical perfection" that Höfer is always by writers rewarded for is the very thing that negates any fingerprints for more perfect mirrors, creating a perfect duplicate of the architecture it wishes to encase in glass. We fill in the rest.